Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's the Rover

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on multivalent signs of gender in The Rover; and the final section, returning to the theater apparatus by way of Behn's unique obses- sions, poses the question of the woman dramatist's signature: How does Aphra Behn encode the conditions of her literary and theatrical production? How does she stage the relationship between female creativity and public calumny-between what Robert Gould, in darkly humorous euphemisms, refers to as "this" and "that"? I. THE APPARATUS The term "apparatus" draws together several related aspects in theater production: the hierarchy of economic control, the material features of machinery and properties, and, more elusively, the social and psychological interplay between stage and audience. When Aphra Behn wrote her seventeen plays (1670-1689), the theatrical hierarchy, like all cultural institutions, was patriarchal in control and participation. Charles II invested power in the first patentees, Thomas Killigrew and William D'Avenant; aristocratic or upper-class males generally wrote the plays, purchased the tickets, and formed the coteries of critics and "witlings" whose disruptive presence is remarked on in countless play prologues and epilogues. In its machinery and properties, the Restoration stage was not unlike Wagner's theater in Adorno's critique: dreamlike, seductive, and commodity-intensive. Though the technology was well established in Italian and French courts, and in English court masques before the Interregnum, the two new Restoration theaters gave Londoners their first view of movable painted "scenes" and mechanical devices or "machines," installed behind the forestage and the proscenium arch. Actors posed before elaborately painted "wings" (stationary pieces set in receding rows) and "shutters" (flat painted scenes that moved in grooves and joined in the center). When the scenes parted, their characters were "discovered" against other painted scenes that, parting, produced further discoveries.5 Built in 1671, The Duke's Theater, Dorset Garden, the site of most of Behn's plays, was particularly known for its "gawdy Scenes."6 The movement of painted flats, the discoveries of previously unseen interiors, introduced a new scopic epistemology. Seated and unruly in semicircular areas of pit, boxes, first, middle, and upper galleries, Restoration spectators, unlike their Elizabethan counterparts, were no longer compelled to imagine the features of bedchambers, parks, or battlefields. Like Richard Flecknoe, they could rely on scenes and machines as "excellent helps of imagination, Elin Diamond 521 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.209 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:18:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
most grateful deceptions of the sight.... Graceful and becoming Ornaments of the Stage [transport] you easily without lassitude from one place to another, or rather by a kinde of delightful Magick, whilst you sit still, does bring the place to you."7 Assuming that Flecknoe's reaction is typical, and there is evidence that it is, Restoration stagecraft seems to have created a spectator-fetishist, one who takes pleasure in ornaments that deceive the sight, whose disavowal of material reality produces a desire for the "delightful Magick" of exotic and enticing representations.8 I am deliberately conflating two uses of "fetishism" in this account of Restoration reception: one, Freud's description of the male impulse to eroticize objects or female body parts, which derives from a disavowal of a material lack (of the penis on the mother's body); and two, Marx's account of the fetishization of the commodity: at the moment of exchange, the commodity appears to be separate from the workers who produce it; the "specific social character of private labors" is disavowed.9 Nowhere are these meanings of fetishism more relevant than in discourse generated by that other ornament of the stage, the Restoration actress. In his preface to The Tempest, Thomas Shadwell links the new phenomenon of female performers with painted theatrical scenes, both innovative commodities for audience consumption: Had we not for yr pleasure found new wayes You still had rusty Arras had, and thredbare playes; Nor Scenes nor Woomen had they had their will, But some with grizl'd Beards had acted Woomen still. That female fictions were to be embodied by beardless women would, Thomas Killigrew promised, be "useful and instructive. "10 What the signifying body of the actress actually meant in the culture's sexual economy is perhaps more accurately suggested by metatheatrical references in play prologues and epilogues. The actress playing Flirt in Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing Master satirically invites the "good men o' th' Exchange" from the pit into the backstage tiring-room: "You we would rather see between our Scenes"; and Dryden, in the Prologue to Marriage A-la-Mode, has the actor Hart refer to passionate tyring-room assignations.1" The private writings of Samuel Pepys are even more suggestive of the sinful pleasures afforded by actresses. On October 5, 1667, he visited the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street: and there, going in, met with Knipp [Mrs. Knep], and she took us up into the Tireing-rooms and to the women's Shift, where Nell 522 Gestus and Signature in The Rover This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.209 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:18:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Page 11 and 12: cannot change their plot. Ultimatel
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Page 19 and 20: them and, it would seem, the woman
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Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's the Rover

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